Tuesday, 31 March 2009

The Iraqi government is offering a 40-square-meter caravan for each displaced family headed by a widow in a newly erected makeshift camp in the eastern side of the capital, Baghdad, the UN IRINnews reports.

The Head of Baghdad council’s displacement committee, Mazin al-Shihan, told IRIN that each caravan contains two bedrooms, a living room, a toilet and kitchen.

The camp, which is a twin for another one erected last year in Baghdad's western side, has a 500-KVA generator, washing facilities and a sewage system. It is designed to house 150 families.

IRIN's story also published for the first time an official statistic, issued by Iraqi Planning Ministry, for the number of widows in this war-plagued country.

“We called it our Berlin Wall,” said Saad Khalef, 41, told The NYT on March 6 story as he surveyed the newly uncovered ground where the walls had stood, as crushed and pale as the skin beneath a bandage. “Now we can breathe easy. Yesterday, I felt a breeze coming through, I swear to God.”The NYT's Anthony Shadid in a piece on Jan. 6, 2011 two days after Muqtada Al-Sadr's return from nearly four-year self-imposed exile in Iraq: In 2004, an American spokesman in Baghdad called Mr. Sadr “a two-bit thug.” On Wednesday, the State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, called him “the leader of an Iraqi political party that won a number of seats in the March 2010 election.”